Debt: The first five thousand years

Anthropologist David Graeber explores the 5000 year history of dept on the Long Now blog.

Hitler can’t get a Folk Fest campground pass.

Update: (2010-05-01) The above video was part of a video remixing meme based on the movie Der Untergang. Was it taken down by the film’s production company? Was it a fair use parody?

Defining Computationally Minimal Art

Old-school optimalism, which aims at pushing technological boundaries in order to fit in “as much beauty as possible”, versus new-school reductivism, which idealizes the low complexity itself as a source of beauty.

useless fliers

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Twitter Annotations

Tweets may soon include optional payloads of structured data. The purpose and usage of these annotations?

“Annotations are a blank slate that lend themselves to myriad divergent use cases. We want to provide open-ended utility for all the developers to innovate on top of.”
— Marcel Molina - Early look at Annotations

Possible Useful Annotations:

• The full URL of all shortened URLs that appear within a tweet.
• Longitude/latitude geo-locations when tweeting from GPS-enabled devices.
• Re-tweet history and/or attribution information.
• Multimedia URLs. Link a tweet to images, videos, and sound files.
• Multimedia data. The system should eventually support 2K payloads containing small images, sound clips, MIDI, etc.
• Microformats

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Algorithmically generated Russian Dolls. (Open with a browser that supports html5 canvas, in other words, not Internet Explorer.)

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openparliament.ca - Keeping tabs on Canadian Parliament.

See what your representatives are saying, and what laws they’re proposing.

Also, they provide a Hansards of the House API while in turn they make use of the How’d They Vote Postal Code API.

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This is a pole covered in bubble gum. We visited friends in San Diego over the weekend. This is one of many photos of our trip.

Nature by Numbers - A short movie inspired by numbers, geometry and nature.

I recommend watching in high-def and full-screen via the above link.

See the theory page for more information on the math that inspired this video.